But it's always possible to repair> > such a drive with the vendor supplied formating utility, which is windows

by the way ... this is wrong. as it turned out later, it was not possibleto repair the usb-flashdisk-utility from the vendor. in w2k, it willappears as "unknown security device" with a big yellow question mark.so if you want to ruin your stick, proceed as follows: - fdisk /dev/sd? - go to expert menu - set numer of cyls twice as high - go back to normal menu - make partition of full size with new cyl.count

happy mke2fsing ;-)

after rebooting (machine will be in unusable state), the device wont be recognizedas usb-storage device. reason: the number of usb-endpoints suddenly dropped to 0 (zero).I don't know if every stick acts this way .. but the Panram one does definitely.